Friday, November 13, 2009

Anwar Ibrahim will get a chance to implement emerging new theories of economic development now that he's been appointed economic adviser to the Selangor state government.

The appointment was announced today by Selangor Menteri Besar Khalid Ibrahim in a bid to enlist a wider array of experience from within Pakatan Rakyat to boost its standing as pacesetter among Malaysian sates where economic development is concerned.

Khalid's administration was recently beset by internal dissension, with a couple of executive councillors opening feuding over matters ranging from the trivial to the important.

Anwar's presence in the state's inner councils would lend it prestige and have a diminishing effect on internal politicking.

Humane economic theories

In recent international forums, Anwar, the former Minister of Finance (1991-1998), has espoused a theory of humane economics which Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have leaned towards as expressing a more holistic description of economic progress.

Until the current global financial crisis caused by subprime mortgages, rises in gross domestic product (GDP) were taken as sufficient indicators of economic progress, figures that Stiglitz and Sen now claim are only narrowly reflective of what analysts say ought to go into computing the Felcific Calculus: the levels of economic ease and social amenity that in combination reflect holistic human development.

While finance minister in the 1990s, Anwar presided over a period of strong economic growth, marked by surplus budgets, adequate spending on affordable housing, easy credit for small businesses, and stability in oil prices and toll rates.

Before becoming finance minister, Anwar held the portfolios of education, agriculture, youth, culture and sports, all of which sharpened his perceptual and analytical faculties for the winnowing of insight from experience.

Anwar's tenure as finance minister was marked by favourable international notices. The prestigious magazine Asia Money named him Finance Minister of the Year in 1996 and NewsweekInternational lauded him as Asian of the Year in 1998.

Anwar' stints as government minister gained him a wide array of international contacts first built up when he was leader of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, a base upon which he leveraged his national prominence to regional and world levels.

Climb up from a fall from grace

But it was not all prominence and glitter. With his sacking from government in 1998 and jailing for possibly trumped-up charges of corruption and sodomy, Anwar was accused of squirreling away RM3 billion in master accounts abroad.

The accusation deepened the depth of moral turpitude that his detractors claimed the once high-flying politician had fallen into.

So it was sweet vindication earlier this week when a former chief of the anti-corruption agency told a defamation trial in Kuala Lumpur that his agency's investigation of the charge in 1999 cleared Anwar of malfeasance.

It was rare vindication for a man against whom a slew of accusations was hurled the moment he fell from grace.

The strong anti-corruption stance of the former minister while in government had earned him the resentment of corporate and political conspirators seeking to amass wealth at the expense of good governance.

No doubt Anwar would be out to justify his reputation for financial accountability and transparency as economic adviser to the Selangor government that had marked his tenure as minister.

Bala alleged that carpet businessman Deepak Jaikishan, an aide of the Prime Minister’s wife, Rosmah Mansor, instructed him to meet Nazim on the day he made public his statutory declaration.

He said the first statutory declaration in which he claimed that Najjib had a relationship with murdered Mongolian model Altantuya Shariibuu, a lover of the Prime Minister’s associate Abdul Razak Baginda, was true.

But he withdrew it and signed a second declaration after he was taken to see Nazim at the Curve in Damansara on July 3 2008 when he was told by the Prime Minister’s architect brother to “follow instructions if he loves his family.”

According to Bala, the specific instruction to him was to withdraw the July 3rd statutory declaration and leave Malaysia immediately.

Hours after that meeting, Bala signed a second statutory declaration which was prepared for him and later issued to the media.

He and his family were then taken by road to Singapore before being flown to Thailand and and Nepal and eventually to India, where he has been hiding since.

Bala gave the startling account of the alleged threats made by Nazim in a tell-all interview done overseas which concluded with him saying: “As a family man, I want to have a normal life. I want to put a stop to all this. ”

FreeMalaysiaToday was provided with excerpts of the interview done in the presence of three lawyers including Bala’s.

In the hour long interview, Bala gave an account of money allegedly promised by Deepak, whose orders Nazim told him to follow.

He claimed Deepak offered him a RM4 to RM5 million deal to sign the second statutory declaration retracting his allegation against Najib, and to remain overseas until Najib was installed as Prime Minister.

In the course of their conversations, Bala said Deepak related to him how he came to know Rosmah and even offered to arrange a breakfast meeting with the Prime Minister’s wife.

“(Deepak said) I can come back to Malaysia after Najib become the PM. (Also) he will make arrangements to have breakfast with Rosmah (for her to ) thank me ,” for retracting the first SD, Bala added.

However, no breakfast meeting took place with Rosmah, and Bala said he never received the RM5 million sweetener promised to him.

Although Najib’s smooth ascension to power took place as scheduled in April this year, Bala saw little to suggest that he would be allowed to return to Malaysia to lead a normal life with his family.

Bala said Deepak gave him about RM750,000 in total to cover expenses for him and his family during their stay overseas. The money was mostly banked into his account with cheques issued by Carpet Raya Sdn Bhd, of which Deepak is a director.

Another revealation by Bala was his meeting with a Malaysian Police Special Branch team which tracked him to Bangkok in July last year.

Bala said the officer in charge of the Special Branch team, ASP Muniandy, asked him which of the two statutory declarations was true.

“I told him the first SD was the true SD. Then he just shook my hand and said, ‘You are really brave,’” Bala quoted Muniandy as saying.

He said the police team then proceeded to record a statement from him for nearly seven hours on the contents of the first statutory declaration and events leadings to the release of the document.

Given the circumstances of fear and continued harassment against him and his family, Bala indicated he wanted to start his life afresh overseas with his family rather than returning to Malaysia as long as Najib and his people were in power.

Efforts to contact Nazim and Deepak were unsuccessful.

[This story originally appeared in Free Malaysia Today as well as Malaysia Today but has reportedly "disappeared" just like Bala! However, nothing is ever "lost" in cyberspace and the post can still be found here and here.]

FLASHBACK TO 18 JULY 2008...

The Bar Council today expressed concern over the number of lawyers being called in for questioning in relation to missing private investigator P. Balasubramaniam.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The greatest of all crimes are the wars that are carried on by governments, to plunder, enslave, and destroy mankind.
The next greatest crimes committed in the world are equally prompted by avarice and ambition; and are committed, not on sudden passion, but by men of calculation, who keep their heads cool and clear, and who have no thought whatever of going to prison for them.

They are committed, not so much by men who violate the laws, as by men who, either by themselves or by their instruments, make the laws; by men who have combined to usurp arbitrary power, and to maintain it by force and fraud, and whose purpose in usurping and maintaining it is by unjust and unequal legislation, to secure to themselves such advantages and monopolies as will enable them to control and extort the labor and properties of other men, and thus impoverish them, in order to minister to their own wealth and aggrandizement.

The robberies and wrongs thus committed by these men, in conformity with the laws, - that is, their own laws - are as mountains to molehills, compared with the crimes committed by all other criminals, in violation of the laws.

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 – May 14, 1887) was an American individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, and legal theorist of the nineteenth century.

[NOTE: The term "spoonerism" was named after another Spooner - Rev. W.A. Spooner - not Lysander!]

"The absolute truth is that Mahathir is an absolute liar." ~ Dr Munawar Anees

On 3 October 2000, ABC (Australia) broadcast this powerful documentary about the sordid political circumstances surrounding Anwar Ibrahim's trial in 1999. This footage was digitized, compressed and uploaded on YouTube on 26 December 2007 - just in time for Malaysia's epochal 12th General Election. I first viewed the documentary sometime in 2001 on a VHS copy somebody lent me; and about a year ago I viewed all seven parts on YouTube.

I think this is an extremely well-researched and competently produced documentary that deserves to be permanently archived as a reminder to all Malaysians of the terrible evils of dictatorial misrule, a corrupt judiciary, and a politically compromised police force. Ten years later, it appears that little has changed.... or is that just a delusion on the part of the Barisan Nasional regime?

At all costs, the interdimensional traveler must never surrender multi-incarnate identity and essence to the Babylon Matrix, or any other such matrix. Since so many readers are most familiar with the hideous strength of the Babylon Matrix, we will give it particular emphasis in this Codex.

From a thousand thousand angles, the dark magnetisms of the Babylon Matrix would love to pull travelers into the wrong ends of telescopes. Essentially, the Babylon Matrix has a tunneling effect that can easily shrink your incarnation until it is like a twisty wormhole burrowing into the festering tissues of a rotten apple. When you choose the wormhole over the rabbit hole your incarnation shrivels and descends like the slow intestinal twisting of an endless, monotonous colonoscopy, winding its way down the wrong end of a telescope.

The Babylon Matrix seeks to remake you in its own image. It would like to play you out as a tragicomic retread, the six billionth remake of Honey, I Shrunk the Interdimensional Traveler.

Teal People are funkier than Real People (photo: Jonathan Zap)

The Babylon Matrix churns out remakes by shrink-wrapping hominids into stock characters. It would love for you to be a frat boy, a homeboy, a drama queen, a geek, a couch potato, a yuppie, a workaholic, a celebrity, a celebrity stalker and so forth. Surrender to its shrinking rays and you might find yourself living out your incarnation as one of these diminutive caricatures, a skin job with a limited shelf life.

In the Eighties, in the early hours of a smoggy and overcast Monday morning on the Cross Bronx Expressway, I first saw what would become a ubiquitous bumper sticker. It read, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.” It was as if the veil had pulled back right there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, and something I wasn’t supposed to see, one of the underlying black magical spells, actual source code of the Babylon Matrix, suddenly became visible in the manifest realm.

"Parallel Journeys" ~ collage by Jonathan Zap

What potency such spells of darkling magic have! A spellbound victim, laboring under the power of malign enchantment, discovers the spell, the actual contract the devil made him sign in blood, and yet cannot break from it. There it is, the devil’s contract, turning slowly in the spinner rack of a convenience store, rendered word for word onto self-adhesive vinyl. The victim purchases this perfect copy of the spell that rules him and attaches it to the bumper of his car where he sees it every day, and yet he never awakens from its power.

"Interdimensional Traveler" - collage by Jonathan Zap

An interdimensional traveler must never surrender to such spells! These spells are swirling around us like sheets of self-adhesive shrink-wrap spun by a tornado. The tornado is a dark and smoky twister. Spinning within the twister are newspaper headlines, faces, fragments of video, sound bytes of neurotic conversations, glossy magazine torsos---a swirling shrapnel of sticky cultural memes. Lose your footing and the twister rips you out of Oz, out of agrarian Kansas, out of all the infinite places you could be, and shrinks you into an anxious meat puppet, stuck in traffic, worried about being late for the florescent-lit cubicle, unpaid bills and debts stinging like pale scorpions at your shrunken kernel-like mind animated by coffee with non-dairy creamer, kept afloat by serotonin specific reuptake inhibitors and propelled by spell-induced fears.

Is there an engine driving the twister that eludes us, adding invisibly to its torque and stickiness? The interdimensional traveler will at least keep that an open question. He knows that there are other worlds than these, and who can account for all the forces that interpenetrate the Babylon Matrix?

Certainly there is no ambiguity about the existence of the agents of the twister, the enforcers and minor black magicians of the Babylon Matrix. They are all around us, uttering their obvious and yet potent and insidious spells from school yards, televisions, street corners, classrooms, boardrooms and bedrooms, from the thousand thousand blind alleys of the Babylon Matrix.

Jonathan Zap earns his stripes as an intrepid explorer of ontological rabbit-holes

The interdimensional traveler must not step through the wrong ends of telescopes! The interdimensional traveler must not let anxious voices, inner or outer, hurry them down narrowing corridors. The interdimensional traveler must not step onto the conveyor belts of degrading and dreary timelines!

God as the Ultimate Narcissist (self-portrait by Jonathan Zap)

Some foolish interdimensional travelers will perceive these injunctions through the exciting, intoxicating and scintillating distortion fields of the archetype of the eternal youth. These archetype-possessed travelers will see the injunctions of what not to do as an infinite license to indulge, and though they emulate Peter Pan on steroids, they end up as flabby Peter Pans with kidney damage, divorcing the Babylon Matrix only to marry flaccid Never Never Lands where obese lost boys play video games in their mothers’ basements. The path of the interdimensional traveler is not a license to indulge, it is a space that opens when the imagination of the eternal youth and the impeccability of the Warrior meld. It is a path that demands prodigious will and discipline. If you try to follow the path of the interdimensional traveler without will and discipline, you will end up as a pathetic lost boy of some sort, sucking weakly at the soured edges of the Babylon Matrix, caught in a grey limbo where embittered contempt for the realm of shrink-wrapped, spell-driven drones melds with a parasitic dependence on the fruits of drone labor.

Mr Zap getting his crown chakra refurbished

Portals open for the traveler on a mission of compassion who is aligned with his true will. Different portals may open for a dark traveler possessed of and by a dark will. Still another set of portals open for the young fool traveler who may, for example, step through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope. Certain intentions beckon certain matrices, for better and for worse.

An interdimensional traveler must be a Warrior, must have a moral purpose, and must be aware of all the shrinking rays that press upon us. The price of freedom for the interdimensional traveler is eternal vigilance about the sticky enchantments that would like to bind us to the Babylon Matrix and turn individualized travelers into hordes of automatons and hungry ghosts. To step across the event horizon you need to molt the many layers of malign enchantment encasing your soul.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Hunab Ku by Star Root, wife of Star Sparks who rejoined his ancestors 15 March 1999

Swedish microbiologist turned student of the Mayan calendar, Carl Johan Calleman, says: "We are now approaching the sixth night of the Galactic Wave Movement, the eighth of the nine levels, which will begin on November 8, 2009. If my understanding of the Mayan calendar is correct we will in this coming night be witnessing the most significant transformation of consciousness ever in the history of mankind. What is exciting about this is that I feel that a relatively clear picture of how a new world is going to be born is now finally becoming evident. On the other hand, what is also becoming increasingly clear is that this birth is likely to become very demanding..."

Today also marks the birthday of my soulsister Arwinda Hurip, the White Witch from Solo, Java, whom I have known for 30 years. This beautiful portrait of her was taken by me in Bali, July 1981. We were then both in our prime. Sigh.

I shall never forget the tremendous surge of PURE JOY that shot through the nation's neural circuitry on 7 November 2008. That was the day I awoke to find a text message on my phone with two powerful words: RPK FREED. Shah Alam high court judge Datuk Syed Ahmad Helmy Syed Ahmad had ruled that Raja Petra Kamarudin's arrest and detention under the ISA was mala fide and procedurally flawed. He added that the then home minister, Syed Hamid Albar, had abused his powers in using Section 8 of the Internal Security Act, which places enormous power in the hands of the home minister and therefore must be resorted to only in extreme situations where an indisputable threat to the nation exists. One bald man on testosteronal overdrive and his homegrown news portal spilling the beans on shenanigans in high places cannot possibly be labeled a threat to the nation - only to the political careers of those he has exposed.

The very next day, my dog Lulu gave birth to ONE puppy. I waited for more to arrive... but none did. In honor of RPK's release from Kamunting, I decided to name the solitary pup Roger Putra. Or Roger Reginald Putra aka Phatty Boy. With unlimited access to all ten of his mother's tits (well, okay, the top two nipples on a bitch are merely ornamental, if you insist on being pedantic), Roger grew up like any Ten-Tit-Tot would: chubby, pushy and utterly spoilt. Today we celebrated his first birthday with a small butter cake. Look at him, the ingrate. Can't be bothered to even look at it. Just like my little boy Ahau. Every year he can't be bothered to attend his own birthday party....

All right, good boy, Feichai-face! At least he got up to admire his 1PhattyBoy butter cake. It must have been his first taste of cake because he at first refused the big slice I offered him (his father the cake-loving Dog of Dogs, Mr Wong, was only too happy to accept it). But when he saw the other canines slurping up the icing, he decided to try some too... and was instantly hooked! Woof woof woof! Happy First Burpday, Darling Phatty Boy!